Is it just me -

or did "normal" just. . .

I mean, we had a good start toward normal. My wife, my daughter Cheryl, and our grandkids Meri, 9,  and Logan, 6, were at the dinner table. Nice. Normal. Then Logan finished eating - that only requires a bite or two or three - and came around to the laptop that was on the table.

Isn't this where "normal" should come in? Was it so very long ago that this would have prompted a question - "A laptop what??" But normal went and moved on me. Now everyone knows what we're referring to as a "laptop". Who doesn't? I mean, gee, Grandpa! Get with it!

The next thing that struck me as not normal was a bowling game on said laptop. The bowling ball had eyes, and those things on the end of the bowling alley looked like people instead of bowling pins. Well, they used to be people. Now they're zombies, the stars of the Zombie Bowl-a-Thon. I kid you not. Sometimes the bowling ball shoots down the lane loaded with bees from a hive, and the zombies do their best to dodge not just the ball but also the bees. Other times it's Disco Zombies - the bowling ball with the eyes zings toward dancing Zombies. Again, I kid you not.

I don't know what we'd have called more abnormal - that Logan went on playing his game like this was all in the course of things, or the look on Grandpa's face while watching all of this. The latter was a source of great amusement.

Normal? I don't even own a cell phone. You know, those things you carry around in a suitcase? The phone's roughly the size of Cincinnati, so you get a crane to lift it up to your ear, and if you tilt your head just right. . .Ah - you mean I could fit one in my shirt pocket? And it can get me on the Web? (OK, all normal people my age, all together now: "WHAT Web!?") No one's even surprised by the power of those devices. We all remember when the kind of computing power in a very ordinary cell phone now would have taken up several floors of a sizable building. (Geez, Papa! For REAL?!)

Actually, I am gradually moving toward getting cell service (help? someone? Verizon? Sprint? AT&T is not a candidate.) But, no texting. (Texting? What - oh, whatEVERRR!!!) And I really have little problem with the idea of kids on the Web - supervised!!! But, I do have concerns.

I'm reading, not for the first time, Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Will a kid who's only used to Web summaries ever manage that gem?

In Faulkner's The Bear there's a sentence that runs, in my edition, to nine pages. When I first read that sentence, I noticed pages and paragraphs sliding by before I noticed that there were no periods, no question marks or exclamation marks. Would a Web addict, used to having thought cut into bite-sized pieces for easy digestion, even know what that was about?

Heaven help the Webophile who tries to tackle any stream-of-consciousness material by Joyce or Faulkner. No chance.

I'm all for kids on computers. Meri and Logan know more about this technology than I did when I was in my 30s, and Vanessa and Jasper, also grandkids, can run circles around me. They're older, you know - 13 and 11.

But am I the only one who thinks that "normal" must have taken a hard, skidding turn somewhere. . .back. . .there?